Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century
Over the course of the twentieth century, Germans have venerated and maintained a variety of historical buildings--from medieval fortresses and cathedrals to urban districts and nineteenth-century working-class housing. But the practice of historic preservation has sometimes proven controversial, as different groups of Germans have sought to use historical architecture to represent competing versions of their nation's history.

Transient Pasts is the first book to examine the role that the historic preservation movement has played in German cultural history and memory from the end of the nineteenth century to the
early 1970s.

Focusing on key public debates over historic preservation, Rudy Koshar charts a trajectory of cultural politics in which historical architecture both facilitated and limited Germans' efforts to identify as a nation. He demonstrates that historical buildings and monuments have served as enduring symbols of national history in a country scarred by the traumas of two world wars, Nazism, the Holocaust, and political division. His findings challenge both the widely accepted argument that Germans have constantly repressed their past and the contention that Germany's intense public engagement with history since reunification is unprecedented.

1118879932
Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century
Over the course of the twentieth century, Germans have venerated and maintained a variety of historical buildings--from medieval fortresses and cathedrals to urban districts and nineteenth-century working-class housing. But the practice of historic preservation has sometimes proven controversial, as different groups of Germans have sought to use historical architecture to represent competing versions of their nation's history.

Transient Pasts is the first book to examine the role that the historic preservation movement has played in German cultural history and memory from the end of the nineteenth century to the
early 1970s.

Focusing on key public debates over historic preservation, Rudy Koshar charts a trajectory of cultural politics in which historical architecture both facilitated and limited Germans' efforts to identify as a nation. He demonstrates that historical buildings and monuments have served as enduring symbols of national history in a country scarred by the traumas of two world wars, Nazism, the Holocaust, and political division. His findings challenge both the widely accepted argument that Germans have constantly repressed their past and the contention that Germany's intense public engagement with history since reunification is unprecedented.

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Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century

Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century

by Rudy J. Koshar
Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century

Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century

by Rudy J. Koshar

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Overview

Over the course of the twentieth century, Germans have venerated and maintained a variety of historical buildings--from medieval fortresses and cathedrals to urban districts and nineteenth-century working-class housing. But the practice of historic preservation has sometimes proven controversial, as different groups of Germans have sought to use historical architecture to represent competing versions of their nation's history.

Transient Pasts is the first book to examine the role that the historic preservation movement has played in German cultural history and memory from the end of the nineteenth century to the
early 1970s.

Focusing on key public debates over historic preservation, Rudy Koshar charts a trajectory of cultural politics in which historical architecture both facilitated and limited Germans' efforts to identify as a nation. He demonstrates that historical buildings and monuments have served as enduring symbols of national history in a country scarred by the traumas of two world wars, Nazism, the Holocaust, and political division. His findings challenge both the widely accepted argument that Germans have constantly repressed their past and the contention that Germany's intense public engagement with history since reunification is unprecedented.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807862629
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 11/09/2000
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 440
File size: 10 MB

About the Author

Rudy Koshar is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880-1935.

Table of Contents


Contents

Preface Introduction

Chapter 1. Documents of Stone Toward a National Optics Preservation and National Life Micropolitics Scrutiny, License, and Control Multiplication and Appropriation

Chapter 2. City of the Unborn Rules and Transgressions Artifacts and War Machines Toward Laudomania?
The Being and Force of Everyday Life

Chapter 3. Modernist Crucible Mixed Blessings The Vulnerable Nation Only to Be Sincere

Chapter 4. Where German Hearts Are Molded The Culture of Leistung
Performance-Oriented Preservation Privileged Marginality Cultural Revolution?
Sodom and Gomorrah

Chapter 5. Commemorative Noise Murky Transitions Archipelagoes of Memory Fragments of a Nation Desire and Doubt

Chapter 6. A Normal Memory The New Past Revived Institutions A Nation Like Any Other The New Past and the Old

Chapter 7. The New Cult of Monuments The New Society Demand for Totality?
A Transformed Nation Every Text, Grand or Humble A Future for the Past

Conclusion. Wrapped Reichstag Notes Bibliography Index

Illustrations Alter Markt 20/22, Cologne Strasbourg cathedral Georg Dehio Paul Clemen Cologne's Gürzenich assembly hall Marienburg Lübeck Dresden Bacharach house The Alsatian fortress Hohkönigsburg Alois Riegl Cologne cityscape at night Rothenburg ob der Tauber Halberstadt Trier Reims cathedral in World War I Reims statuary before and after German bombing German war monuments vandalized Duderstadt streetscapes Wartburg Stuttgart Old Castle Gustav Decker's Cologne ensemble Ernst Stern's Brandenburger Tor Bruno Taut's colorful facade Jacobikirche bells Nuremberg's old German ambience Munich in Weimar poster art Marksburg in the Rhineland Genovevaburg in the Eifel region Performance of Nazi building plans Braunschweig cathedral as a model for relevant historic preservation Nazi psychotopography of Berlin Speyer cathedral Autobahn as a window on commercialized history and landscape Frankfurt am Main Altstadt
Paul Herrmann's The Flag
Marching columns in decorated Nuremberg Nazi kitsch Cologne after the bombings Troops march through Münster rubble Doing away with unsavory monuments on the Munich Königsplatz St. Alban's and Gürzenich St. Alban's as a cultivated ruin Ruins as bulletin board in Dresden Ruins as souvenir for GI and his German wife Ruins as movie set Prinzipalmarkt before and after World War II St. Lorenz in its prewar grandeur Walter Ulbricht and the rebuilding of Dresden Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church Rothenburg ob der Tauber Römerberg flora, Frankfurt am Main Hildesheim market square in 1900 and 1962
Dresden corpses and DDR memory Leonhard church and zeppelin in Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt am Main cathedral in the programmed city Römerberg and the "Mickey Mouse Middle Ages"
Nikolaikirche ensemble and DDR "Disneyland"
Eisenheim in the Ruhr

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